In a recent interview with the Austrian newssite derStandard.at, GNOME designer Jon McCann talks about GNOME OS, the consequences of Canonical leaving GNOME behind, the purported removal of features and the future role of Linux distributions. "I think there was a time when GNOME had kind of a crisis, we didn't know where we wanted to go, we were lacking goals and vision - that was the end of the GNOME2 cycle. So we pulled together and formed a vision where we want to go - and actually did something about it. And now we have been marching on that plan for quite some time."

Yes, and you also lost the majority of your users and corporate support. Ubuntu didn't came up with Unity out of thin air, it was a clear response to GNOME's new "vision". Ubuntu knew it couldn't count on GNOME 3 because it was too radical: to an outsider it felt like developers were having "visions" while completely ignoring the bad feedback received from users. The transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 wasn't good at all.

And why do you think Fedora 18 will have the MATE desktop (a GNOME 2 fork) on the official repositories? Hint: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will be based on Fedora 18.

Unity is part of Ubuntu's vision to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Linux desktop. That split came before GNOME 3, and Canonical was never a major contributor to upstream GNOME in any case.

Also MATE is going to be in Fedora for the same reason the other 20+ window managers and toolkits are there: a group of independent developers wanted it there and packaged and then submitted it. Red Hat has their entire desktop team working on GNOME 3 and related technologies, using something else for RHEL makes absolutely no goddamn sense.